Luis Rechani Agrait, "My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts" (Swan Isle Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Luis Rechani Agrait, "My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts" (Swan Isle Press, 2025)
Host: Jeffrey Herlo Guimera
Guest: Jonathan Cohen
Date: January 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of the New Books Network features a conversation between host Jeffrey Herlo Guimera and scholar/translator Jonathan Cohen about the first-ever publication of William Carlos Williams’s translation of My Excellency (“Mi Señoría”), a political comedic play by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait. They delve into Williams’s lesser-known work as a translator, the intersections of Puerto Rican and American identity, and the cultural resonances that translation brings to both literature and lived experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Project and Personal Academic Context

• Literary Lineage & Influence

  • Jeffrey recounts how two books—Julio Marzán’s The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams and Cohen’s By Word of Mouth—shaped his thinking and career, serving as inspirational scholarly models.
  • Quote:
    • “Translation for him was above all an act of poetry.” (Cohen, as cited by Guimera, 04:02)

• Williams’ Puerto Rican Connection

  • Williams’s 1940 visit to Puerto Rico, friendship with playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, and his cultural curiosity sparked the translation of My Excellency.

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2. Jonathan Cohen’s Scholarly Trajectory [05:45]

• Began translating Latin American poetry as an undergraduate, influenced by a diverse literary and translation scene.

• Noted the long-time neglect of Williams’s translations in academia, leading to his decade-long recovery of Williams’s translation output from Spanish, French, Chinese, and Greek.

• Quote:

  • “Without appreciating Williams's translation work, one cannot fully appreciate his development and his achievement as a writer.” (Cohen, 07:48)

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3. The Discovery and Condition of the Manuscript [09:01]

• Cohen found the play’s manuscript in the University of Buffalo catalog in 2019.
• Only the first two acts (of three) were found; the third act’s translation is missing, raising questions about authorship, loss, or intention (09:51).

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4. Williams as Translator: Methods & Motivations [10:24, 13:36]

• Williams used translation as a creative tool to sharpen his dramatic dialogue, practice his “American idiom,” and bridge his international and local identities.

• He offered little on translation theory, emphasizing instead poetic skill and the goal of making a great work in English.

  • Memorable Quote:
    • “Recreating the poetic quality of the original text is key to success. Theories don't help all that much. Poetic skill does.” (Cohen, 12:27)

• Williams intended the translation to find a producer, and perhaps never completed the third act due to his demanding medical and literary careers.

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5. Language, Family & Cultural Mediation [16:57, 18:17]

• Williams’s multilingual home life (Spanish from mother, English from grandmother, Spanish literature from father) deeply shaped his writing and translation sensibilities.

• Translation acted as cultural bridgework, blending his Puerto Rican heritage and New Jersey upbringing.

  • Quote:
    • “…his ambition was to really, as translator, be a bridge, a cultural bridge between the New York area, New Jersey and San Juan, Puerto Rico…” (Cohen, 16:57)

• Spanish served as a resource for technique and innovation, especially apparent in Patterson.

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6. Translation as Creativity and Identity Work [22:39, 28:58]

• Translation was a source of literary invention and personal exploration for Williams, not merely an academic exercise.

• Working with both parents in translation expanded his engagement with Spanish and world literature.

• Revision was central; Williams often endlessly refined translations, seeing them as living texts.

• Quote:

  • “A translation was never finished, it can only be abandoned.” (Cohen, 27:16)

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7. Neglect of Williams’s Translation in Scholarship [28:58]

• Williams's translations were long seen as secondary to his “original” work—a result of academic nationalism and disciplinary boundaries.
  • Quote:
    • “My contention is that without appreciating his work as a translator, one cannot fully appreciate his development and his achievement as a writer.” (Cohen, 29:44)

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8. Context and Relevance for Today’s Audience [32:03]

• The new book provides:

  • A political satire that illuminates Puerto Rican history and 1930s politics.
  • Layers of scholarly context (essays by Marzán, Cohen, and Ramos Escobar).
  • An invitation for Puerto Rican students to explore local culture and global creative exchange.

• Quote:

  • “For a Puerto Rican student, the book should open up Puerto Rican culture…The play is a product of…an effort by dramatist, Puerto Rican dramatists…to really write stories by Puerto Ricans about Puerto Rico for the world.” (Cohen, 33:44)

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9. Intersections, Identity, and Misunderstandings [38:57, 40:41]

• Williams’s dual identity (“Bill” vs. “Carlos”) impacted how he represented himself publicly versus what he drew on creatively.

• The translation reveals “Carlos”—his Puerto Rican, multilingual side—often missing from his authorized autobiographical narrative.

  • Quote:
    • “The translation of My Excellency was done by Carlos. And this is that aspect of Williams…his half Puerto Rican self. And this work, this book really is another piece of that puzzle of Williams Puerto Rican roots.” (Cohen, 39:25)

• Williams’s home life and cultural “otherness” shaped not only his literary sensibility, but also his interactions and self-conceptions as an American poet.

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10. Current and Future Projects [44:40]

• Cohen is working on a translation and selection of early poems by Chilean poet Enrique Lihn, forthcoming from New Directions.

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Memorable Quotes by Theme

• On Translation as Poetry:

  • “Translation for him was above all an act of poetry.” (Guimera quoting Cohen, 04:02)
  • “A great poem written in a foreign language must be a great poem in its English translation.” (Cohen, 13:36)

• On Bridging Cultures:

  • “His ambition was to really, as translator, be a bridge, a cultural bridge between the New York area, New Jersey and San Juan, Puerto Rico…” (Cohen, 16:57)

• On Overlooked Translations:

  • “Translation…has been elevated…It long had been considered in English departments a secondary kind of work, not an act of poetry, not a form of creative writing.” (Cohen, 29:28)

• On Revision and Translation:

  • “A translation was never finished, it can only be abandoned.” (Cohen, 27:16)

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Notable Moments & Timestamps

• Introduction of Project’s Importance [02:15–05:42]
• Cohen’s Biography and Scholarly Motivations [05:43–08:12]
• Manuscript’s Incompleteness and Editorial Challenges [09:01–10:14]
• Williams’s Approach to Translation [13:36–15:24]
• Translation as Cultural Mediation [16:57]
• Reflection on Williams’s Multilingual Household [18:17–24:58]
• Theoretical & Institutional Neglect of Translation [28:58–30:13]
• Advice for Contemporary Puerto Rican Students [32:03–35:00]
• Williams’s Split Identity – “Bill” vs. “Carlos” [38:57–42:33]
• Cohen’s Current Translation Projects [44:40]

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Thematic Takeaways

• Translation is Central for Literary Innovation: Williams’s engagement with translation is not auxiliary but foundational, creating space for experimentation within—and a bridge between—languages and cultures.
• Dual Identity as Creative Resource: Williams’s negotiation of Puerto Rican and “mainstream” American identity is a source of both struggle and literary richness.
• Revival and Recognition: Efforts like Cohen’s bring crucial attention to the neglected but formative work of translation in multi-ethnic, diasporic literary histories.
• Relevance to Today’s Readers: The text and its context invite students to reconnect with local histories and to see translation as both an artistic and civic act.

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This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in literary translation, Puerto Rican studies, William Carlos Williams, or the cultural intersections at play in American literature. The conversation is warm, deeply knowledgeable, and an inspiration to view translation as central—rather than peripheral—to the making of meaning across borders.

Transcript

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

This.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

Jeff, thank you so much for having me in conversation with you about this exciting new book.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent. Thank you. And I wanted to give some context about how this book got into my hands and about how Jonathan's scholarly work has influenced my own. When I was A graduate student in Spain in the 90s, in the early part of the 2000s, I read Julio Marsan's Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, which is a book that blew my mind. An achievement in literary and cultural criticism, eloquent and insightful. Even though it was published in the 90s, it still has an immense freshness to it. And then when I moved to Puerto Rico to be a professor here, my first few years, I spent working on my first book, which is about how cultural displacement impacts writing and how living in a Spanish speaking environment can influence a person's use of English and things like that. It was very interesting. And then just as I culminated that project, Jonathan's wonderful book by Word of Mouth, which is a text about Williams translation and his relationship with the Spanish language, about how Puerto Rico had a shadow across really everything that he did, that book came into my hands. And bringing those texts together in compilation and with citations that I'd never read before about Williams childhood home, about his mother's life and influence on him, and about my abuelas. And I remember putting that down, that book down for a moment and saying to myself, if you can do this, you can bring together these things that are biographies of places, of people, of words. It was one of those moments in my life when I kind of paused what I was doing and I just said, yeah, I really like this. If you can use words to do this type of scholarship, this is what I want to do. And it was an inspirational moment, and it still is. And I wanted to quote one phrase from Jonathan's introduction to that book, which is the following translation for him was above all, an act of poetry. And that's from page 22, a beautiful and a timeless phrase that transcends English and Spanish. And so Julio Marsan and Jonathan Cohen are both, in a sense, heroes to me because they show me what is possible, what you can do with critique and research and insights and these things, when they're about your community and your experiences, they can change your life. And I would say that in as much as the text of literary criticism can change your life, these books did that for me. Word of Mouth and Spanish American roots. They made me think in new ways and want to live in new ways. And Last year, in 2024, we hosted the William Carlos Williams Society Conference, which was an amazing event to have both of you guys, Julio and Jonathan, here on our campus was very special. And Julio gave a charlamagistral and Marta Ponte did as well. And I had the opportunity to chair my own work. And it was very special and made me interested in this new translation, in this new book. And so after that long preamble, William Carlos Williams. This book really comes out of William Carlos Williams visit to puerto Rico in 1940, when he befriended the playwright Luis Ricciani Agarait, who gave him his play Mi Signoria My Excellency, as Williams calls the play in his translation. It is a political farce set in an imaginary country that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression. And driving the comedy in Williams translation is his firm command of the play's dialogue, interwoven with popular idioms in which the charm of pure nonsense abounds. It's edited with an introduction by Jonathan Cohen, has a foreword by Julio Marsan, and an afterward by Jose Luis Ramos Escobar. And so, Jonathan, thank you so much for your work and for this book. And I wanted to just start off by thanking you and asking could you tell us a little bit about your biography, your interests and background and experiences and how they've kind of crystallized in your interest in Williams and his translations?

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's a pleasure to speak about this. Let me tell you about myself first. I am a poet, translator, essayist, and scholar of Inter American literature. I translate mainly Latin American poets. I am an Americanist, using American in the original sense of the word, that is continental. So my activity as a poet and translator began during my college days at Stony Brook University, where there was a dynamic poetry scene. Latin American poets were part of that scene. There was Jorge Cabrera Andrade, Jaime Giordano, Pedro Lastra, Nico Norpada appeared on the scene. And there were translators of Latin American poets, such as the great Hoffman Hayes, who lived on Long island, who published in 1943 the seminal book Twelve Spanish American Poets. So when I was an undergraduate, I started the work of translating Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardinal. And that led to my interest in translation studies back to Williams. The work of Williams was much discussed in my classes as an English major and also among my friends. He was one of the greats in our world. But his work as a translator wasn't talked about then. I modeled my own poems after his at the time, that is, poems made out of colloquial American speech, looking at everyday things around me. It was Years later, in 2008, to be specific, that I learned about an overlooked group of Williams unpublished poetry translations in his papers at Yale. That got me started on my work, recovering his translations, not just those from Spanish, but his translations of fiction and drama from Spanish, plus poetry and fiction. From French and poetry, from classical Chinese and classical Greek. In a nutshell, my thesis is simply without appreciating Williams translation work, one cannot fully appreciate his development and his achievement as a writer.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent. I agree certainly especially with the way that the Spanish language and the other languages that were around in his home life and his formative years. Excellent. And what was happening in Williams life when he took on this task? Do you know if he knew Rejani Agarete very well at that time, or did they have like a correspondence? Are there any letters available?

[Jonathan Cohen]

I am not aware of any correspondence. My impression is that he met Reichani in San Juan, that he liked Rey Chani. He was happy to receive Rey Chani's book. And I don't have any awareness of correspondence.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

And where were you when this project came together? Did you come across the manuscripts also at Yale? And what was your experience with kind of editing and compiling and revising them?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, I had, as I say, undertook a project to recover Williams translations. And so I became a seeker and I looked wherever I could look, thinking there might be a translation in little magazines, etc. And I also have a book catalog of Williams papers at the University of Buffalo. And in perusing the catalog at Buffalo, I noticed that there is a play script there, Riccione's. And so that's what led to this book. It started in the year 2019, and then I obtained a copy of the manuscript.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Was it. It was incomplete, as I understand, right?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yes. The homing at the University of Buffalo includes the first two acts of Mi Signoria, My Excellency, which is a three act comedy. So the question comes, the mystery becomes, where is the third act? Did Williams translate? Did it get lost? So these questions remain sound.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent. And could you reflect a little bit about translation as a cultural act? And what do you think Williams was expressing by exploring or taking on this project?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Williams was exploring Puerto Rico because the play is about Puerto Rico. The play is a work associated with the Puerto Rican group of the late 1930s, early 40s. 40s. The Areito Group that looked to writing about Puerto Rico with Puerto Rican characters, Puerto Rican landscapes. But in exploring Puerto Rico, Williams was doing something he did with all his translations in this project because all of Williams translations were part of his own literary agenda. And at the time when Williams was translating the play, he was at work on a play of his own that later was published and also staged for nearly a year in 1959, his play called Many Loves. In doing the translation, Williams was exercising his dramatic skill at Writing dialogue. So in that way, the translation project fit into his own agenda. At the time, of course, Williams had intended to help the play find a producer. And I have no record of what actually happened. I have found no correspondence or any record of Williams contacting producers. And he might have used just the first two acts as a sample to interest a producer. It's important to remember that at the time Williams was full time physician, a pediatrician and obstetrician, and his workload was very demanding. And his other literary projects, his own poetry, etc. Kept him very busy. And so it's also possible that the play project translating my Excellency got upstaged, so to speak, by his medical work and his other literary work.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

We have some scholars here in Puerto Rico who are interested in working with, and I hope to get some more people on board Emilio Quinones Hotel, who has expressed an interest in hopefully at some point in the future, bringing some of Elena's artworks here to our campus as an exposition, which I think would be fabulous. I feel like Williams is. The work that you're doing especially really can establish some new connections and bring kind of Puerto Rico and our university into a conversation where I think we should be. I think that there's a lot of things happening here, a lot of exciting things, and I feel like our conversations in 2020 were a big part of that. And actually I wanted to quote something from our email correspondence that really struck me as we were preparing for today. And one thing that you said, recreating the poetic quality of the original text is key to success. Theories don't help all that much. Poetic skill does. I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that in relation to Williams. Do you sense any sense of theory or systematic approach in his translation? Or do you have any comment on Williams skill as a translator in general?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, this is a good question. So simply put, a great poem written in a foreign language must be a great poem in its English translation. Its translation must be a great poem in its own right. Its poetic quality must be carried over into English. And Williams certainly understood that. And he made it very clear that the first step in making a translation is to have a clear idea of the language, the so called target language. And for Williams, that was what he called the American idiom, that is to say, English as spoken in the United States. Williams did not elaborate on theory, translation theory at all. However, he did make a very clear statement in a draft of his essay about Lorca that he published in 1939. I found an outtake that didn't appear in the essay itself, but he makes the statement that more poetry, more literature from the Spanish would benefit writing by American authors. And he used this language, he said, by word of mouth and no literary English. And that really sums up Williams approach as a translator. He also used the phrase accurate equivalent, but he never really elaborated on what he meant by accurate equivalent. I mean, the demonstrations of his translations are the best way to appreciate what his idea behind that phrase.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent, Excellent. A few weeks ago, we had an activity on campus, actually, in fact, it was a virtual roundtable, which I can link down here in the description called the Art and Science of Translation, or El arte laciencia de la Tradition. And one thing really struck me about from Rebecca Ruth Gould, who's a professor at the University of London, and she said that one of her strategies is what she calls co translating. And to go through this with two voices, one person from the target language and one person from the other. And I think that Williams, he may have done this with his. I guess his father would have passed away by that time, but his mother. Maybe with his mother. But. But I feel like Williams is an interesting position between. I mean, of course, English was certainly the dominant language in his life, but he did have, certainly, I would imagine that he would have emotions and different things that are accessible in Spanish in a way that I think is probably a bit unique to a person who comes to another language as a translator in a different kind of an academic space. And those types of things are. And I feel like what you just said was wonderful, that it must be a great poem in the new language. And I feel like what you said about the poetic quality. Absolutely. And I feel like Williams probably had a really excellent kind of perspective and experiential background, kind of infrastructure for doing that. And so to what extent, kind of engaging on that idea, to what extent, if at all, do you think that Williams brought in translation as kind of an act of cultural mediation between his own life in New Jersey and his family background in Puerto Rico?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, Williams is known for being a poet of the local, of his own locality, but at the same time he was very international. So his translation work certainly is an expression of his internationalism. I think that in translating Mi senoria my Excellency, his ambition was to really, as translator, be a bridge, a cultural bridge between the New York area, New Jersey and San Juan, Puerto Rico, to really connect the two by way of translation.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Yes, yes, absolutely. And I feel like what happened on our campus last year, the Carlos Williams Society conference brought many, probably was an extension of that, another chapter of what Williams really was interested in. And that event brought new questions and uncertainties and contexts and perspectives and ways to appreciate Williams background, but also the richness of the culture and history of. And one of the aspects I'm particularly interested in is the Judaism in his background, in his family, but also the role of the Spanish language in his life in this case. In your opinion, what can the publication of this book make possible in that story? What kind of new context can it give us to consider about Williams life, but also to bring attention to Puerto Rico in new ways and new times?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Okay. Well, this translation underscores the role of Spanish in Williams life, which, as you mentioned earlier, goes back to his birth, his childhood. It was the language his mother spoke. She didn't speak English really in his earliest years. English was present, though, because his father's mother was in William's home speaking English. But Spanish really runs through William's life. His father, William George, introduced both his sons to the literature of Spain. And Williams actually began translating from the Spanish after 1909, when his first book of poems didn't do well and Ezra Pound recommended that he translate a Spanish poet. So, again, when Williams was in Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941, when he met Rey Chani, it surely awakened his own Spanish, and he was speaking Spanish there and with people he met. The translation shines a light on his engagement with Puerto Rico, clearly. But before his visit to Puerto Rico, he was very interested in his mother's background, her life in Puerto Rico. In fact, in 1936, when he started translating with her the Spanish Golden Age novella El Pero y la the Dog and the Fever. His scheme, as he described it, was to use the translation as a subterfuge to get his mother to talk about her life in Puerto Rico, which is something she didn't generally want to do. A lot more, of course, can be said about My Excellency and Williams encounter with Spanish. Again, if you look at Patterson, his masterpiece, his epic, the conceptismo he got from translating the Spanish Golden Age novella the Dog and the Fever, becomes a technique that he's using in Patterson in book one. And as you can see, that is a demonstration, another demonstration of how translation for Williams became a way to discover technique, to discover form, which he was seeking throughout his career as a writer.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Yes. And with respect to his mother's situation and their relationship. And I've been doing some research about. Yes, Mrs. Williams did recently for a project that we're working on with the William Carlos Williams review. And one of the things that was really impactful to me in my rereading was the amount of names, the amount of last names that appear in the book. There must be 75 or 100. And it kind of makes me think. And these are all real reflections from the island, from St. Thomas, from Puerto Rico, some from New York. But I think that mainly she's talking about her experiences here in. And it makes me think about kind of my own mother and her kind of the list of names that I know through her. You know, the Hills, the Shokovitz, the Kirschners, the Barclays, the Keefes, the Sullivans, the Dalies. And each one of those names, for me, has a whole set of different connections. And I imagine. I wonder, it must be that way for. It must have been that way for Williams with these different names. And it really kind of adds to the kind of myth of what was there, kind of the infrastructure of all these things. Like you said that he used a way to discover a technique to bring out new modes of language and coming through with those different. Just those feelings and those experiences, the family experiences through his mother. I feel like the relationship with his mother was a key. I mean, of course, the mother tongue and everything. And that's our language being always tied to the person with whom we speak, with whom we spend a lot of time when we're infants and young children. And I think that that's probably not. Not an exception with Williams. One of the things that really impressed me about your work is that you bring those things out. And it brings me into those questions about this manuscript and other scholarship is the focus on translation as creativity and his relationship to language itself. Could you comment a little bit about what those things make possible in his life, what the Spanish language make possible, what the translation made possible for him, maybe as a writer, but also as a person.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, one thing I want to clarify is that William's relationship with Spanish was not at all limited to his relationship with his mother. His father, William George, was very, very attuned to Spanish culture, Spanish literature. In fact, William's translation of the short story that he did with his father, the man who Resembled a Horse horse appeared in 1918. So working with his father, also with the Spanish language, and that's a great.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Point about his father and the relationship with language that came through him. I would imagine that his mother and father spoke Spanish together since they met in the Caribbean and they moved. They both spent really a lot of their Formative years as people here in the Dominican Republic, in Puerto Rico, and sometimes in St. Thomas, and they would have brought that linguistic environment with them. It kind of makes me think a little bit about my wife and I. We met speaking Spanish, and so we speak Spanish together with our son, with my sons. Our sons. I speak English to them as much as I can, but I speak Spanish to my wife, and she speaks Spanish and she has some Quechua in there, so she speaks those languages to them. And so we have this kind of triangulation in language that I think must have happened also in Williams's life. And I feel like what you just said about Williams's father and the relationship, his relationship to the Spanish language, and I wonder. It makes me wonder about how. How much Spanish he would have had with his. With his father and as much as he did with his mother, but also about what those things mean in a kind of a meta linguistic sense about what those allow beyond kind of the US Because I feel like there was a lot of pressure on him to be, at least publicly, to use the English language and also to kind of create a certain. I feel like his poetry and his extraordinary use of the English language, doing those things, bringing all of those wonderful Americans idioms out through his text, multilingual kind of background and experiences allow him to have that sensibility with the English language. And what do you think about how the other languages in his life. I would imagine there would have been some French also in his childhood home and as a teenager, and how those aspects kind of affected his interests and also his writing.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, absolutely. I mean, his work with French again. He translated with his mother the surrealist novel Last Nights in Paris. It's by Suppot. He did work as a translator also in the early 1940s with the surrealist poet Nicholas Kallas, who was Greek but wrote in French. So again, I feel that the translation work was, for Williams, a way to explore language and the possibilities of language and of making his American idiom, his English, to expand the possibilities of his own language. So in going out to translate Mi Senoria, for example, my Excellency, he is looking to see how the translation of Spanish drama will enrich his skill with English in creating his own drama, his own play. Many Loves, for example. And in his autobiography, he does have a very short chapter called Translations. And in that chapter he talks about the translation of Spanish being able to open up our own language to new possibilities.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent. Yes, and I think that that's very important with what he was doing with, like, you said about using his translations as a bridge to create these new areas of experience. And in your revisions with this book, did you find any significant revisions with his translations? Was it a manuscript? Was it typewritten?

[Jonathan Cohen]

What I found was a typescript. There were very, very few corrections in this typescript, so there was not much revision work demonstrated in the typescript. However, Williams was one definitely to revise his translations. And there are other translations where the marginalia is replete with revision. Also, he even published different versions he made of the same poems, for example, to show that he was working very intensely at recreating work. And the revision process made it a very active process. I believe Williams would agree that a translation was never finished, that a translation can't be finished, it can only be abandoned. Yes.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

And one of the really great things about the work that you've been doing and that you are certainly on this project is bringing these translations out to kind of a critical and more accurate sphere. And it's certainly true that Williams translation really have received significantly less attention than his other work. And what do you think that that comes from? Do you think that this. What does that omission kind of conceal? And what can we gain through putting our focus on what was happening in his life through translation? That there's attention to his use of monolingual English as a tool, as a kind of being, that being the metallurgy of. Of his creation. But I feel like there's probably a lot of other factors that are coming in, and the way that language also codes philosophies and experiences and emotions, and maybe because of certain contexts, certain standards, certain traditions within literary criticism, that his translations really have not received a lot of critical attention. They're kind of overlooked, in a sense, which I think is real strength of what your work is. And I don't know. Do you have any comment about that kind of critical situation with the fact that there is really so little attention on his translations?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yes, there are, I think, several reasons why William's translations were overlooked for such a long period. It's only in recent decades that translation as a discipline, as a literary activity, has been elevated, starting, you know, of course, with. In the 80s and 90s of the past century with translation studies, make it possible to see translation in a new way. Translation long had been considered in English departments a secondary kind of work, not an act of poetry, not a form of creative writing. And this has a lot to do with the ideologies that underlie English departments, the historic nationalism that puts English above all other literature. So Again, for various reasons, the translations were just simply overlooked. Not that important. My contention is that without appreciating his work as a translator, one cannot fully appreciate his development and his achievement as a writer.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Absolutely. Yes, Very well said. I agree absolutely also with the ways that these things have been kind of placed into kind of ideological categories. And that really influences the structure of literary criticism and where it occurs again, in different departments within the university. Our university here, for example, we have an English department, We have a Hispanic studies department, and we have a humanities department where I work. There's not a lot of. And we don't have any translation. We don't have anybody who studies translation and works on it, which is really, I think, kind of a product of another age. Because now all this richness that really comes out of these interlingual and translingual experiences and is. We all are translating all the time here, whether it's unavoidable. And I feel like it must have been also the case during Williams's life. And this kind of. It is an opportunity for us to put some institutionalization towards what can we learn about translation?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Translation mean.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

What does it mean when a person sits down and says, you know, I want to create this in another language and I'm going to do it poetically? I feel like all those things were what Williams was trying to do. And to bring these in translation in itself, I guess, from the Latin across and then places to bring these places together, but also the people who live in them and all their fears and loves and anguish and passions. Yeah, it. Translations is such an interesting thing to talk about, and especially to talk about it through Williams. I mean, whoa, how cool. And so if Williams. This is a question that I absolutely love. And we ask in all of our episodes, can you situate your work on Williams translations within the context of Puerto Rico today? And what can a reader, specifically a student in Mayaguez today use, learn and apply from your book in their life or in their academic career?

[Jonathan Cohen]

I just want to comment on Williams as a translator. He looked at translation as a way to explore how English can be made fresh and new. So as a translator, he's looking at a text to see what will this foreign language text do to make English via translation do things it has not yet done. So he was doing this not in isolation, of course. His good friend, the poet Ezra Pound, did that with the Chinese, for example, his book Cathay, published in 1915. And again, it was Pound who urged translation on Williams, who told Williams to translate. Because translation not only is It a way to see what a foreign text will do to motivate English to do new things. Translation is a way to serve as an apprentice to a master writer. And to your question about what can a reader or a student in my quest today, for example, use, learn or apply from the book. First of all, the book presents a very entertaining play and its purpose is to amuse this book. Its primary purpose. It is a political satire. It's a work of fiction in essence. But for a Puerto Rican student, the book should open up Puerto Rican culture. The play is a product of, as I say, an effort by dramatist, Puerto Rican dramatists in the mid 20th century to really write stories by Puerto Ricans about Puerto Rico for the world. And that's what my excellency is an example of. It's a drama of the island. So a student can discover the pleasure of reading a play script. But a student can also learn about the political world of the 1930s that Reichani is commenting on in his satire. There was a lot of corrupt politics at that time in Puerto Rico with buying and selling of votes, for example. So there's that history. But the book also offers three essays. The Forward by Julio Marzan, my Introduction, and the Afterword by Ramos Escobar. So the book offers. Has different levels of engagement. But again, the aesthetic of the local that the book celebrates, that was central to the creative mission of the Arietal group is something that provides a strong lesson to readers and to students.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Yes, I agree. Especially levels of engagement and bringing students into their local context and thinking through different political and social and cultural environments. Excellent, excellent. But one thing that came to me came to mind as I read this, but yeah, and I wonder about if Williams, if he would have had any really interaction with or the people who lived in the rural areas, especially in that time, which was a significant amount of Puerto Rican culture nowadays.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I don't think Williams had any encounter with the rural when he was there in 1941, I don't think at all. And I don't know to what degree he was familiar with the stereotypes of the Puerto Rican Heboro. I had no idea. I know that his own experience personally was with educated middle class. That was his experience, you know, with the Puerto Ricans who went up to the north, you know, around 1900, end of the 19th century. Like Anna, who was so helpful to him with his medical career.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Right, right. Yeah.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's not well known that Anna and William's father, William George, knew each other.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

As children in Puerto Rico.

[Jonathan Cohen]

In puncle.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Yeah. When I think too about Williams relationship specifically with Puerto Rican Spanish, well, it makes me wonder about how the different accents of Puerto Rico have evolved in the last, say 150 years. Because there's some interesting studies in the south about how kind of US English in the south there was not so much a divide between, for example, racial groups in the South. It's at a certain point, but then that has developed into different kind of almost regional kind of accent isolates. And I wonder if it's the same with for example, his mother's Spanish being probably more similar to the people around Mayagues, which was really an agrarian based community at that time because there's sugar cane and there were, you know, people who were from Africa and people who were. And so she would have been surrounded by that. And so I could kind of think that her accent may have been different from the. What is now kind of the Puerto Rican. There's a real distinction now between what they call el acento rivaro and you know, another way of speaking which is kind of the learned kind of accent, kind of like a CNN English for vis. A visual, you know, a Southern accent or something in the US But I wonder about those things. And this book made me think about that.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, did you know that one of the titles, potential titles for yes, Mrs. Williams was the Sugar Cane Girl who was My Mother? No, I didn't.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Is that in one of the archives?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yes, that can be found in manuscripts at the Beinecke Library at Yale.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Wonderful. I can't wait to get there. We did a podcast with Scott Peterson a few months ago how it was really, really cool and I'd love to get up there to do some research, especially into yes, Mrs. Williams, the sugar Cane Girl who was my mother. Just taking a note here. Yes. Because when you look at some of the reflections about her swimming in the river behind the house and in my way at that time the population was. Might have been 25,000 and that's the whole larger area, not just the pueblo where she lived. And so I think, I feel like that the accents at that time would have been significantly more uniform, I think, between. Because there was so much less kind of contact between the areas and also people moving from one place and then coming back, even though it did happen, but really neat in relation to all of these things. Is there anything that you feel critics of the general public might misunderstand about Williams and his life and his work that could be illuminated by your trend, by this book?

[Jonathan Cohen]

I think that this book is a good example of what Julio Morzan calls the identity dynamic embodied by Williams. That is to say, Bill versus Carlos, for example, as Marzan would say. Williams autobiography was written by Bill. And in that autobiography, for example, there is very little about Puerto Rico that the dynamic experience Williams had with his week in Puerto Rico in 1941, there is no mention of it in his autobiography. The translation of My Excellency was done by Carlos. And this is that aspect of Williams is his half Puerto Rican self. And this work, this book really is another piece of that puzzle of Williams Puerto Rican roots. And so the book really underscores that aspect of Williams, the Puerto Rican aspect.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent, Excellent. Very well said, too, with Julio Marsan. That book that he wrote is just. It's wonderful. It's a real. And also by word of mouth. And those two, as a pair of. I had such a great experience reading them, and I love knowing that those books exist. I feel like I can go to them, to go back to them for strength when I feel like I want to. Because you're really thinking in new ways and really creating a new map that's already there, but really putting attention to things that the tradition, that kind of the conventions only focus on Bill. And those are, I feel like, very much indebted to you and to Julio for all of that work.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, it's important to appreciate that Williams, you know, grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. His home was different from the homes of all the other kids homes. Williams home smelled different from the different kind of food that his mother prepared. You know, it had that Puerto Rican, Caribbean dimension to it that was different. And like most children who are the other in a community, they want to assimilate. And so Williams was Willie growing up. He was Bill, ultimately. And he built his literary Persona based on the local, his own geography, his rejection of expatriates like T.S. eliot. And he wanted to be and succeeded at being, Mr. America, Bill Williams. And at the same time, clearly throughout his work as a. Not only as a translator, but also in his book, 1925 book in the American Grain, he's bringing in the reality that he is, that is to say, a mingling. Mingling was a word that was so key to Williams that he embodied that, as he would say, we in the US have more in common with Spain and Spain of centuries ago, where it was a mingled culture, not like England. So Williams throughout his life struggled, I suppose, and the conflict produced great literature. This struggle between his relation with the outer world, the local, and his inner being, his self, his Personal history, his family history.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

That's wonderful, Jonathan. And I think that maybe part of Williams's reluctance to kind of perform the Carlos. Part of him, at least linguistically written in writing, but also in speaking, maybe because he may have had some anxiety about his. And it makes me think a little bit about the relationships that he would have had with. With people from Puerto Rico who had just recently arrived in the Northeast as he was working, because I'm sure that he did at the hospital and all the career that he had as a physician. And it makes me think a little bit about when my grandfather, who went to Ireland in the 90s, and when he came back to the US I remember he actually was the man who lived here in Puerto Rico. He had raised a family in Massachusetts and then moved here. But when he went to Ireland and then he came back, I remember I was. Was so interested in hearing about his stories, about what he experienced there. And it really took some prodding to get him to talk about it. And he only said one sentence to me. He said, I don't think I'll ever go back there. And that kind of makes me wonder about what happened with his. What happened when he met the family there and things that he. Because I feel like his accent was very different and the way that he pronounces our last name is probably very different, and all those things and how those would have, you know, maybe going there to find something that wasn't available anymore because he's, you know, we really are pegged to where we have our experiences and the languages in which we have them. And so those things, I think, are really complicated for people like Williams who are in the spaces that are. And not defined, you know, that are. That are kind of. They're beautiful and they have. They make a lot of things really interesting people possible. And I feel like the most interesting people are like that, you know, be them Einstein or Williams or someone like Rody Ansaldua, who are able to kind of navigate those spaces, like Julio Marsan also, who are able to bring those things together and do so in such a way that really can contribute to all fields, both Spanish and English, and where they come together. Do you have a project that you're currently working on now?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yes, I am currently working on a book of poems by Chilean poet Enrique Lean. This book called Celeste, Daughter of the Earth and Other Early Poems, will be published next fall by New Directions. My friend David Unger and I are making all the translations as well as the selection of poems. So it will be an amazing book and I'm really enjoying working as a translator at this time. So that's the project that's first and foremost for me right now, as I have a deadline to get the final manuscript in by the end of this month.

[Jeffrey Herlo Guimera]

Excellent. Congratulations on that. I'm very, very glad to hear that. And I feel like your work about how just thinking about Williams as driven by a kind of translation narrative and about all of that, what all that makes possible in understanding him and thinking about him, it's really an excellent, excellent contribution that you've made to Williams studies into literary studies. So. So thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you, listeners, for joining us on this journey through translation migration through one of the layered, interwoven stories of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Translations like William's and John's remind us that identity and belonging and language are never necessarily fixed points, but shifting places that we carry within us. So thank you very much, Sean.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Jeff, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about all this. It's a subject that means a lot to me.